Table of Goods, 2017

Basel 2018
Table of Goods

Goodman Gallery

Installation
Soil, sugar, coffee beans, ground coffee, cocoa, dark chocolate and candles
Edition of 5
100.0 x 150.0 x 150.0 (cm)
39.4 x 59.1 x 59.1 (inch)
Subversive storytelling is central to Grada Kilomba’s decolonising practices. She creates a hybrid space between academic and artistic languages. Strongly influenced by the work of Frantz Fanon, Kilomba’s projects often involve elements of memory and trauma. In her emotive installation Table of Goods (2017), Kilomba memorialises centuries of labour and the deaths of black workers on colonial sugar and chocolate plantations. In this context, Kilomba uses the term unspeakable as a metaphor for trauma, and the colonial wound, explaining how, ‘colonialism is a wound that has never been properly treated, an infected wound that always hurts, and sometimes bleeds.’ Grada Kilomba’s distinctive practice draws on the repressed history of colonialism and its traumatic legacy to create new forms of knowledge.